These pictures were inspired by the time I spent in China during 2005 and 2006, and are part of the Scanning China Project. Vessels and Banners
is a visual metaphor for the experience of learning to live and work in China and, more generally, represents the process of coming to know a culture different from one’s own.
Ceramic vessels have fascinated me since my early childhood in South Korea, where I saw ancient celadon pulled from newly furrowed rice fields. Later, hunting painted shards with my father in Arizona, the edge of a broken piece of pottery emerging from the desert evoked fantasies of discovery and deep connections with the past. Ceramics, physically embedded within the particular ground of a specific history, become tokens of trade and currency when removed from their space or time, and can travel continents and endure centuries. As both container and decorated surface, these objects embody the culture of the people who made them, and this physicality and process of transformation – from anonymous clay to artifact and then back to common earth – touches on history, art, science, and the shape of knowledge itself.
The ceramics in these pictures – brush holders, rice bowls, teacups – were excavated from weekend flea markets in Beijing and Shanghai. The pictures are made by moving the ceramic across the glass of a flat-bed scanner as the scanning sensor was also moving. The object appears warped because it drifted in and out of sync with the sensor during the scan. As I worked, the glass of the scanner became abraded and smudged by the ceramic surface of the vessels, causing the scratches and other texture visible in the pictures. There is no additional “digital” distortion added to the pictures.
One of the things I like most about these pictures is that they are and yet are not “photographic.” On the one hand, the picture comes directly from the indexical interaction of light and surface; i.e., light reflects from the surface of the object and is recorded by the photo sensor in the scanner, just as happens within any digital camera, and indeed, substituting film for the CCD or CMOS sensor, just as photographic imagery has been produced since the beginning of photography.
On the other hand, unlike “normal” photographs, these pictures do not record frozen moments in time. That is, while a snap-shot records objects arranged within space at a given moment in time, these scanner pictures record an object that has been arranged (moved) in time within a given space (the distance from one end of the scanner bed to the other). To put it another way, these pictures are not “frames” taken from a continuum; there are no “before” or “after” pictures that might be (theoretically) reassembled into a film-strip or motion picture. Rather, as exact visual records of the particular path the ceramic takes through the space and time of the sensor’s journey from one end of the scan bed to the other, each picture is unique and unrepeatable (that is, the file is unique and unrepeatable because I could never duplicate the motion and synchronization of any two scans – additional prints can be made as long as there’s ink in the printer).
I’ve been told that the pictures are contradictory and puzzling - i.e., you can see and almost touch a well-defined and detailed surface, but it’s frustratingly difficult to determine the overall shape of the object itself. This is exactly the reaction I’m hoping to elicit, though I hope the frustration isn’t overwhelming. In other words, much like the experience of being immersed in a culture that is vastly different from your own, which can indeed be frustrating at times, I hope investigating these pictures is also invigorating and fun.